How I moved into the eighteenth century. I have always preferred spoilers, I cannot stand dramatic tension, suspense kills me, so I have decided to move into the eighteenth century, about which I have a clear sense of how it ends.
Reading the famous authors, philosophers and poets, from the eighteenth century has always felt reassuring, now I am embarking on reading newspapers in order to keep up with daily politics—what is happening a certain court, which ministers are falling or rising, where are there threats of war (more places than anyone remembers), what are the blow-by-blow politics of the century—how do the large monarchies threaten each other constantly. Will England and Spain attack each other? How have Russia and the Ottoman empire managed so many long wars against each other? How is the French minister trying to take advantage of all these machinations?
Read the newspapers, save the historians for later. The Wiener Zeitung starts in 1703, Wandsbecker Bote is a much later (1771) addition to Hamburg newspapers. They are all available online.
Back in graduate school in the very first month of the first semester we read Jürgen Habermas’ Strukturwandlung der Öffentlichkeit, where from the start the eminent philosopher notes that newspapers brought information to Hamburg merchants eager to know more about shipping and politics in distant places. Turns out there were even more newspapers than I ever imagined.
We generally have never been told that the eighteen century was packed with newspapers that spread information about Europe and more. Poets and philosophers were supposed to have composed in a vacuum of information about politics and the economies. I had the vague sense that newspapers became important in the nineteenth century as mass production arose to create the masses, who increasingly were literate. Only when philosophers like Nietzsche fulminated against newspaper reading did they matter—this alas was all wrong.
Newspapers started in northern Europe during the Thirty Years War, when urban populations were eager to know about the movements of threatening armies. Now, as I cannot bear my own century, I am off to the eighteenth to read about day-to-day politics from London, Versailles, Wien, Warsaw, and the Ottoman border. Turns out there are some similarities. Russian stand-offs with Ottomans across the Danube River have a familiar ring. Stay tuned, let's see how it works out.....
